Les équilibristes, a film by Nico Papatakis with Michel Piccoli, inspired by Jean Genet, was broadcast in two parts on October 11 and 18, 1991, on La Sept. It was on this occasion that Philippe Grandrieux made this short film for the antenna of La Sept, consisting of an interview with Nico Papatakis and the reading of extracts from Jean Genet’s text, “Le tightrope walker”, read by the actress Ann-Gisel Glass.Read More »
An interview with Genet.Read More »
From Amos Vogel’s Film as a Subversive Art:
Genet’s only film — hounded by the censors, unavailable, secret — is an early and remarkably moving attempt to portray homosexual passions. Already a classic, it succeeds as perhaps no other film to intimate the explosive power of frustrated sex; male prisoners in solitary confinement “embracing” walls, ramming them in erotic despair with erect penis, swaying convulsively to auto-erotic lust, kissing their own bodies and tattoos in sexual frenzy. In a supremely poetic (and visual) metaphor of sexual deprivation, two prisoners in adjoining cells symbolically perform fellatio by alternately blowing or inhaling each other’s cigarette smoke through a straw inserted in a wall opening, while masturbating. Like all of Genet’s early work, the entire film is, in effect, a single onanistic fantasy, filled with desperate frustration and sensuous nostalgia. In the end, and after many failures, some flowers — painfully passed from one barred window to the next — are finally caught by the prisoner in the adjoining cell in a poetic affirmation of love in infinite imprisonment.Read More »